More control surface parts! I asked Sonex about those CCC-34 rivets that are called out to attach the nutplate to each flap drive rib. Turns out it was a typo, and it was supposed to be SSC-34's which I do have! They came with the hydraulic brakes kit. I also noticed that I was supposed to countersink all the holes on the flap drive ribs and use flush rivets. So good thing I hadn't gone ahead and riveted it yet.
I picked up this microstop countersink, and it's great. It took a few minutes so set up, but once it was set I was able to knock out all the countersinks pretty fast, and they are consistent!
I also found that if I drilled the through hole for the nutplate up to 3/16" on the rib, I could use a cleco to hold the nutplate in place so I could transfer the two mounting holes. After that, I updrilled the hole to 17/64", which as far as I know is the proper clearance hole size for a 1/4" bolt.
Anyway, now these two parts are finally done!
Aileron drive ribs also done!
These two channels were tricky to rivet because the holes are so close to the flange.
Not a big deal, I just ground some more material off of my low profile rivet puller!
This poor thing is probably going to break any time now as I keep shrinking it, but for now it works great!
Next was the aileron counterweight assemblies. The kit comes with a 1" thick block of lead, which just needs to be cut in half to produce the two weight blocks. I cut it on the bandsaw, which was actually really easy.
With those two things ready, I just had to build the assemblies to go with them. I used some tabletop geometry to locate the first rib on it's corresponding plate.
Once that was set I transferred a few holes from the plate to the rib, and then clamped that rib to its opposing rib and transferred the holes to it. That took care of locating all the parts on the first assembly.
Then I took each rib off and transferred the holes again to the other opposing rib, to create two identical pairs.
With everything now located, I just had to transfer the rest of the holes, updrill, deburr, and rivet!
The next step was drilling the lead blocks in between the plates. This was not as easy! I found that once the drill bit started cutting it would get sucked in real quick and then either get stuck or just break. After snapping a couple of #40 bits I started the rest of the holes on #30, which worked a little better. I probably could have started even larger. Anyway I eventually got all the holes up to 3/16". Then I took them apart to deburr and scrape off the chunks of lead that were wedged between the plates.
I had to hammer the crap out of these bolts to get them through the lead!
Done!
I think between these six little parts I pulled almost 200 rivets, so if they say this kit is around 10,000 rivets that's like 2% right there!
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